It is a surrender, a premature disheartening surrender, since it would secure freedom and free institutions by migration rather than by protection; by flight rather than by right; by going into a strange land rather than by staying in one’s own.
In his autobiography, Douglass characterizes the proposed exodus of Black Americans from the South as a disheartening surrender, prioritizing flight over the assertion of fundamental rights.
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Nothing but the shot-gun or the bull-dozer’s whip can keep them from voting their convictions.
Still another ground of hope I find in the fact that colored men are strong in their gratitude to benefactors, and firm in their political convictions.
The vote of the colored man, formerly beaten down and stamped out by intimidation, is now revived, sought, and defended by powerful allies, and this from no transient sentiment of the moment, but from the permanent laws controlling the…